by Jeff Hirsch
“I don’t care about that.”
“I know that’s not true. Cardinal—”
I was sick of talking. My fingers uncurled from the lamppost and came free. I shuffled down the railing, out toward the center of the bridge where it rose the highest over the falls. Freeman shouted, but I ignored him. I stopped halfway across. Jagged rocks reached up toward me. Water spun in eddies around them and then shot away. I shut my eyes and thought of Hannah and the kids, but it lasted only a second before I was back where I belonged—with you and Greer in the Gardens of Null. I took a deep breath. The muscles in my legs tensed.
“I can make you forget!”
I looked over my shoulder. Freeman was just behind me on the sidewalk, his white hair dancing in the wind.
“The virus can be changed,” he said, his voice trembling. “Re-engineered. A version can be made that will infect you.”
“How do you know that?”
Freeman took another step closer. He held out his hand.
“Because,” he said. “I’m the one who created it.”
26
“EVERYTHING STARTED with Henry Allan Forrest.”
We had left the bridge and were moving fast up Main Street. Freeman had his head down and his hands stuffed in his coat pockets.
“Henry was a U.S. Marine from Indiana. The son of a barber and an elementary school teacher. Blue eyes. Freckles. Red hair. Twenty-five, but he looked nineteen. He served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan before returning home to a hero’s welcome. Two and a half weeks later, while his parents were out getting the car washed, he used the dog’s leash to hang himself in their basement.”
We passed St. Stephen’s and City Hall and then started up the streets that wound through the northside mansions. Freeman produced a small flashlight from his pocket. Its beam slid over once well-manicured lawns that had become thatches of weeds and wildflowers.
“And Henry wasn’t alone,” he said. “There were thousands just like him. Young men and women who came home only to discover that the war they thought they’d left behind was still lodged inside them.
An address on the side of a mailbox glimmered when the light hit it. Freeman left the street and led me across an overgrown yard. A house emerged from the dark. No, not a house, more like a castle. Freeman started down a fieldstone walk and stopped at the foot of the stairs. White columns, like palace guards, stood on either side of a nearly eight-foot-tall front door. Freeman moved the flashlight’s beam over the door’s brass fixtures and up to a chandelier hanging over the porch.
“A team of researchers decided that the solution was to reach inside their heads and pluck out their memories of the war. Without those memories, they believed, soldiers like Henry Allan Forrest would be transformed back into the people they were.”
Freeman climbed the stairs to the porch slowly, delicately, stopping just shy of the front door. He lowered the flashlight.
“Freeman, what are we doing here?” I asked. “Who lived here?”
“Charles Ellis Dumay.”
“Who was Charles Ellis Dumay?”
Freeman brushed the brass doorknob with his fingertips.
“Me,” he said.
Behind us, there was the distant beat of a helicopter’s blades as it flew over Black River. I climbed the stairs, stopping a few steps short of Freeman.
“You were one of the researchers.”
“No,” he said. “I was a scientist, though. Once. A good one. But then some people offered me a very large sum of money to do something else.”
“What?”
Freeman sat down at the top of the stairs, facing me.
“Travel the country, identifying research that had the greatest potential for profit. I became aware of the work of a small group of researchers in a lab in Atlanta. I thought it was something that could be expanded on and sold, most likely to one military or another. I bought the company, moved them here to Black River in secret, and steered their research in a direction my employers thought would be most profitable.”
“A virus.”
There was a click as Freeman turned off the flashlight, dropping us into darkness.
“Think about it,” he said. “A weapon that can erase the past. What government on earth wouldn’t want that?”
“What happened?”
He looked into the dark beside the house. “Will you go somewhere else with me?”
“Freeman—”
“It’s close,” he said. “I promise. And I think things will make more sense this way. Please.”
He left the front porch and I followed him around the back of the house and across an immense lawn that ended at a tract of woods. We pushed our way through the trees until we emerged at the edge of a paved road. On the other side of it there was a large, dark clearing. Freeman crossed the road and kept going, his flashlight picking out heaped piles of rubble that we had to maneuver around.
“Where are we?”
Freeman said nothing. He stopped and turned in a circle, playing the flashlight beam over the wreckage around us. We were surrounded by piles of charred wood, metal, and cinderblock. I saw the skeletons of tables and chairs. Two partially collapsed walls rested against each other in the distance. I was standing in the remains of a building that had burned to the ground. I suddenly realized it was a place I’d seen a thousand times before, but always from the top of Lucy’s Promise, where it looked like nothing more than a black smudge north of town.
“The Greeks believed that when you died, you had to cross five rivers before you could enter paradise.”
He was a few feet away from me, ankle-deep in ashes, moving his light over the black hills of debris.
“The first four were the rivers of hate, sorrow, lamentation, and fire. The last was Lethe. The river of forgetfulness. No one could enter paradise until they’d had their old lives wiped away.”
“What happened here?”
Freeman glanced over his shoulder. “The scientists I brought to Black River were idealists, but they weren’t stupid. They put together what we intended to do with their research and decided to expose it. My employers asked me what I thought they should do to prevent this from happening. I told them it was obvious. Infect the scientists with the virus, then take their research and start over somewhere else.”
A breeze stirred the ashes at our feet. Freeman’s eyes were gray hollows.
“Two of them escaped the lab after I infected them,” he said. “I don’t know if they made it to Monument Park that morning or if someone they infected did, but the outcome was the same.”
His light slid over the remains of a wooden desk and blackened steel cabinets. Bits of broken glass glittered in the ashes.
“When I realized what was happening, I started a fire in the lab to erase the evidence. My employers said they’d get me out, but they were lying, of course. I was a loose end. I tried to escape before a quarantine was put in place, but I was infected.”
Freeman jerked aside as I came at him through the ashes, but he wasn’t fast enough. I planted both hands square on his chest and knocked him onto his back. He tried to scramble away, but I fell on him, straddling his chest and pinning him in place. I dug in the debris beside us and lifted out a charred plank the size of a baseball bat.
“Wait. Cardinal, please.”
“You did this. You did all of it.”
I lifted the club over my head, aiming for his skull.
“I wasn’t lying when I said I could make you forget!”
My arm froze where it was. I tightened my grip on the end of the plank.
“Your friend,” Freeman said. “In the National Guard. Can he still get you out of Black River?”
I nodded. He pointed awkwardly to his right coat pocket.
“Take them,” he said. “Please.”
I kept one eye on him as I reached inside and pulled out four small black notebooks.
“What are they?”
“My memory,” he said. “Everything
I wrote before and after I became infected. Names. Dates. Enough to make sure everyone who needs to be held accountable for what happened here will be. There are details about the virus too, how we engineered it, how it works. With that and whatever’s in your blood that’s made you immune, I think Dr. Lassiter will be able to make a cure. A vaccine at least.”
I got up slowly, holding the plank in one hand and the notebooks in the other. Freeman scurried away and retrieved his flashlight.
“You’ve had these all this time? You could have sent them to the police. The newspapers.”
“They’ve been watching me,” he said. “They’re always watching me.”
“Who?”
Freeman nodded toward the notebook on the top of the stack. I opened it, and he shined his flashlight across the pages. They were filled with names and dates and formulas that meant nothing to me. But one thing stood out. A name was referenced on nearly every single page. As soon as I saw, it was so obvious that I wondered how I hadn’t realized it before.
“Martinson Vine,” I said. “They were your employer. That’s why they pushed to take over the quarantine from the Guard. Why they arrested you that first day.”
“And why they ransacked my library,” Freeman said. “They wanted to see if I was still a loose end. Luckily, there’s no better place to hide a few books than a library. My antic disposition was enough to convince them that I wasn’t a threat.”
I weighed the notebooks in my hand. “What about . . .”
Freeman produced a thin white envelope from another pocket deep in his coat.
“Like I said, I was a scientist once too. Dr. Lassiter will be able to use what’s inside this envelope to engineer a version of the virus that will infect you.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked. “Infect some kid he doesn’t even know.”
“Because, unlike Charles Ellis Dumay,” he said, “Evan Lassiter is a good man. He’ll understand that the reason those scientists started their research in the first place was to help people like you.”
“What do you mean people like me?”
“People who are trapped somewhere they don’t want to be.”
I took the envelope and turned it over in my hands. It contained nothing but a few sheets of paper. Was it really possible? A new world. A new me. I slipped it into one of the notebooks.
“You trust me with all of this?”
Freeman allowed himself a thin smile. “I told you, one glance and I knew your past and your future.”
“If all this gets out, the Marvins won’t be the only ones in trouble.”
“I’m responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people,” he said. “Including your friends and family. Even after I testify against my employers, I expect to be in jail for a very long time.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
Freeman looked over the ruins, back toward Black River.
“I’ve stood on that bridge too, Cardinal. Many times. Whatever the powers that be decide to do with me will be better than I deserve.”
He held out the flashlight and I took it.
“You’re not coming?”
Freeman didn’t answer, he simply turned his back on me and walked out into the wreckage, until the darkness swallowed him up.
27
I WAITED UNTIL I was sure everyone would be asleep before I went to the high school. The front door creaked as I pushed it open. I snapped the flashlight on and followed its beam down halls lined with stacked chairs and tables. The walls were covered in construction-paper posters from before the outbreak. I felt like I was walking through a haunted house.
I found Hannah and the others sleeping on cots in the auditorium. Safety lights by the doors cast a cool glow through the cavernous room. I crept down the aisle and onto the stage. Hannah was on her back, her eyes closed. In the flashlight’s beam the white sheet that covered her looked like a mantle of snow. My backpack sat on the floor beside her.
I turned off the flashlight and knelt by her cot. Hannah moved onto her side, her lips slightly parted, her breath ruffling the thin sheet that draped her shoulder. I forced myself to look away from her face and reach for the backpack. I unzipped it and felt around inside. My notebook. A pen. At the very bottom was the cell phone Gonzalez had given me. I dropped Freeman’s notebooks inside and zipped the pack closed.
When I stood up, a hand snapped around my wrist.
“Card?”
I tore myself away and sprinted out of the room. I was nearly to the exit when I hit one of the stacks of chairs that had been left in the hallway and went sprawling across the floor in a rattle of collapsing steel. I tried to get up again, but Hannah was on me before I could move, her hands on my shoulders, pinning me down.
“It’s still you, isn’t it? You’re still Card.”
“I don’t—”
“We tried to find you, but you were gone. We looked everywhere. What happened? How did you—”
I knocked her hands off me and rolled away, scrambling for the backpack amid the fallen chairs. There was another crash of metal as I yanked it out of the pile.
“You’re immune.”
I pulled the backpack close and wrapped my arms around it. Outside, moonlight struck the sidewalk and lawn. They were only a few feet away, on the other side of the glass doors, but I suddenly felt so tired I stayed where I was, kneeling on the tile floor, my back to her. I nodded.
“So, you’re leaving?”
She was sitting cross-legged behind me in a pool of moonlight coming through the windows in one of the open classrooms along the hall. Her hair was mussed. She was barefoot, in plaid pajamas.
“Yeah.”
“I could go get the kids if you—”
I shook my head. If I saw them, if I talked to them, I knew I’d never be able to do what I had to do. “I think I should just go.”
Hannah stared at me. Footsteps sounded on the floor above us. Someone was coming to check on all the noise. I lifted my backpack and started for the door.
“Hey.”
Hannah was standing in the hallway.
“Let me change,” she said. “I’ll walk out with you.”
It was a clear summer night. The streets were empty. I told Hannah everything that had happened with Freeman. Who he was. What he’d done. The notebooks, his hope for a cure, and his certainty that Dr. Lassiter would be able to infect me. She nodded through it all, saying little. When we passed a neighborhood playground, she left the sidewalk and sat on one of the swings. I took the one beside her, and we drifted back and forth.
“Do you think they’ll send you back here?” she asked. “Once you’re infected.”
“Guess they’ll have to send me somewhere.”
“Well, if it’s here, you don’t have to worry. We won’t bother you.”
“Hannah—”
“Not bother you,” she said. “You know what I mean. We’ll let you be no one, like you want.”
We were quiet for a while, and then Hannah jumped off the swing and crossed the playground to a set of monkey bars. She climbed the ladder and crawled out to the middle, where she sat with her legs folded beneath her. I climbed up behind her and found a spot of my own, four or five feet away. Old habits.
“Do you really think he’ll be able to make a cure?” Hannah asked.
“Freeman seems to think so.”
“You don’t?”
I shrugged. Miracle cures and villains brought to justice. They seemed like things that happened in the pages of one of Dad’s comics.
“If there’s a cure, do you think they’ll make us take it?”
She was leaning over the edge of the monkey bars with her arms wrapped around her middle, staring at the ground.
“You don’t want to find out who you are?” I asked. “Why you came here?”
“I already know.”
“You do? Did you talk to the Marvins or—”
“I didn’t talk to anybody.”
“Then how do you know?
”
Hannah sat up and looked out to where St. Stephen’s spire rose over the town.
“There’s this scene in Hamlet where the queen has to tell Laertes that his sister, Ophelia, died,” she said. “Ophelia was in love with Hamlet, and he loved her too. But then one day he became cruel. He toyed with Ophelia and he rejected her and he would never even say why. In the end Ophelia drapes herself with wildflowers and lies down in a stream to drown. When the queen tells her brother what she’s done, it’s this beautiful, sad speech. There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . . The first time I read it, I started to cry. There was something about it that seemed so familiar. I thought maybe it was because I’d studied the play in school or something. But it wasn’t the whole play that felt familiar, it was just them, just Hamlet and Ophelia.”
She smiled dreamily.
“I felt like I knew them so well that I knew things Shakespeare didn’t even write. Like how, in the beginning, when they were still happy, they used to meet in secret at a cabin with a sky blue door. But there were things Shakespeare got wrong, too.”
Her look darkened and she turned away again.
“It wasn’t Hamlet who became cruel. It was Ophelia. He loved her and she toyed with him and rejected him. It was Hamlet who was heartbroken. It was Hamlet who drowned. And when Ophelia saw what she’d caused, she felt this pounding deep in her chest, like a second heartbeat, and she just . . . ran.”
Hannah fingered the key around her neck.
“No one needs to tell me who I am,” she said. “I know.”
“Hannah, you can’t really know that. You—”
She looked back over her shoulder. The sun was just coming up over Lucy’s Promise.
“Tomiko and Crystal have to start cooking breakfast soon,” she said. “I like to be there when everybody wakes up.”
She slid off the bars and landed on the ground. When we got back to the high school, Hannah climbed to the top of the stairs, but she didn’t go inside. She stood there, just under the single bulb that lit the entryway, staring at our reflections in the glass of the front door. The night was soft and quiet.